Maybe this should be in GD, but I’m not sure. When I was in elementary school I was a Catholic (believes in God of Bible). When I got to High School I decided I was an Atheist(does not believe in God). When I got to College I decided I was an Agnostic(God is unknown and probably unknowable). I went from insisting there was a God, to insisting there wasn’t, to accepting I don’t know.
With the last step, I decided to try to figure it out based on experience and intuition. Obviously, what I learned would not constitute proof to anyone but me. I decided to experiment daily to try to feel if there is a guiding presence and a grander pattern. About this time, I read the Celestine prophesy. The book as a whole seemed a little silly and dumbed down, but one thing I really liked about it was what it had to say about synchronicities.
The book suggested that those weird coincidences that we all experience (like thinking about someone you haven’t spoken to in years and the phone rings: it’s them)are more than just random chance occurences. They are signposts. When one happens, you should (according to the book) pay special attention to your surroundings and situation. You should allow the coincidence to in some way change your course of action. Be more aware of what is going on around you and act on it. Supposedly, doing this leads to an increased occurence of coincidences and a happier path in life.
OK. Fun theory. Let’s give it a try I said. Sure enough it seems to work. I mean damn if I don’t experience a couple crazy coincidences a day now. So my question is two-fold:
Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon (I’d love to hear stories about crazy coincidences)?
What could explain this phenomenon?
Obviously it could be a guiding force, but I am inherently skeptical, and would prefer to exhaust other possibilities before I accept this. Is it just a trick of psychology? I’m looking for more of them so I find more of them. Just a reality of a system with so many possible outcomes that many will be related?
For your first question, in my case, the answer is No. My life and all the events in it are particularly unremarkable, particularly when you consider that, while other people have these really cool “crazy coincidences” going on, the most interesting thing I can say about my daily activities is that nothing interesting at all occurs.
For your second question, why do these things happen to everyone except me? It’s because God wants to make me feel boring.
If you’re interested in synchronicities Carl Jung is your man. His ideas about the collective unconscious pretty much set the standard.
My experience has been that if you’re simply more aware of what’s going on in your life on all levels you’ll notice “synchronous” events popping up. I think some of that stems from the fact that we can become awfully automotized to life - doing things by rote and not paying attention to the details. We then end up living life in a certain pattern, even though we’re not atuned to it. When you do become atuned to it, it seems to be a revelation. It can be just that - if you learn to get out of that pattern and try some new things.
That sounded awfully new agey and I didn’t intend for it to. Anyway, check out Jung. There’s also a web site devoted to the collective unconscious idea. I believe its callled “Flow” or something like that.
…is that to properly test that hypothesis would require some kind of experiment and control.
An analogy:
We call an upper respiratory infection ‘a cold’ because we used to think that they were caused by cold weather. Even after viruses were pinpointed as the cause, the assumption was that cold weather made people more susceptible. The anecdotal evidence appeared to verify this assumption. Only carefully designed experiments with controls uncoupled the two concepts (cold and URIs) and most in the general public are still not aware that there’s no real connection.
Thus, it’s possible that what you’ve identified as “synchronicity” events really are just coincidental. Only a carefully designed experiment would tease out that question.
By the way, a friend has coined a fourth category in the issue of ‘belief in God’ – he’s neither theist, atheist, nor agnostic. Instead, he’s an ‘apatheist’ – ‘I don’t really care about the question; it really doesn’t make any difference to me whether there is or not.’
I didn’t know it was them. I wasn’t talking about psychic powers!!! I was actually shocked to at the weirdness that they call when I was thinking of them. Another example:
The word Kentucky came up 3 times inside of 10 minutes in 3 unrelated conversations happening around me at a bar. Bizarre. Another:
Meet a girl at a party. She says she’s from Laguna beach. I know someone in Laguna beach I say. Then I kick myself. How big is Laguna? The odds of them knowing each other are slim. It’s like asking someone who’s jewish if they know this jewish guy you know. Unlikely, right? Now this person I knew from Laguna was someone I went to boarding school with in Masachussets. I had fallen out of contact with him and lost phone numbers and all. Hadn’t seen or spoken to him in years. Turns out they went to elementary school with each other. She had his number in her phone book in her purse. So I met a girl in new York who new a Guy in California that I went to school with in Masachussets at a party thrown by a girl that I met in KENTUCKY!
Cool.
plnnr:
No doubt. He has some very cool things to say. The whole shadow personality thing is a favorite of mine.
lamia:
Doesn’t get deep enough into a real explanation for me. It’s kind of skirting the issue.
Every person experiences countless “events” every day. The phone rings, they read something in the paper, they interact with another person in some way (even it it’s just to mutter “Thank you” to the check-out person at the grocery store), they experience various sensory inputs (they hear things, they see things, they smell things). It’s not even possible to make a count of the number of potentially significant “events” in one day of the life of one person. With all of these “events” taking place, in the lives of millions and millions of people, how could there not be times when two “events” coincide in a way which seems meaningful to that person? Especially given that we aren’t defining this significant interaction in advance.
I’ll give it some thought. ( Hey, I didn’t say I knew of one, just that it was needed… )
Let’s see, for an experimental control, we need a universe in which there is definitely no God, then we monitor for a period of time whether that universe and our own has an equal number of synchronicities…
Seriously, it all depends on the hypothesis. If the hypothesis is that synchronicities are signs of a divine presence in the universe, vs. random chance, then perhaps it’s as simple as monitoring a certain period of time, identifying the number of synchronicities, and running them through some statistical models/equations to determine whether they fell above random chance or not.
There may be other ways to get at this question. Other ideas welcome!
Take a string of truly random “events” like the digits in pi. (Okay I guess they’re really pseudorandom but it’s close enough)
Now let’s say you’re the kind of person who can hold approximately 1 million digits in active memory at any one time. You then sit down to read the digits of pi. The chance that you’re going to see something “weird” happen, like seeing an entire block of all 9’s, is pretty low. The string of 9’s is out there, but you probably won’t find it in the finite time you’ll spend on this experiment. Real people though can’t hold a million digits in active memory. I think the actual number is more like 4 (if memory serves me, and it probably doesn’t, so feel free to correct me). The chances that you’ll see a block of all nines while reading through pi are pretty good then. On average you should see a block of four nines in any 10,000 digits (umm…I’m pretty sure I’m screwing up already) which would be something like every hundred pages or so. If you keep your eyes peeled for blocks of four of any digit, the likelyhood that you’ll find it goes up by a factor of 10. If you also admit other “weird” patterns, like “1212” or the last four digits of your phone number or your birthday, then the chances of finding something go through the roof.
And this hasn’t even addressed the issue of selective memory (when you subconciously “forget” or just don’t process any events that don’t meet your preconceived expectations) or the fact that seemingly unrelated events may in fact be related (if you overheard the word “Kentucky” come up once, maybe someone else did and then repeated it, causing you to overhear it again).
Someone, somewhere, in some magazine article I once read (how’s that for a cite) theorized that our limited capacity to hold events in memory and our subsequent prediliction for seeing patterns evolved as a survival tactic. For example:
Urg and Snurg pet the sabretoothed tiger on the nose.
Urg and Snurg get eaten.
Grlax has evolved a scientific mind. He formulates a hypothesis that petting a sabretoothed tiger on the nose leads to death. He tests this hypothesis. Grlax fails to pass on his genes to a new generation.
Fnrg observes these events and decides that there is a pattern here. He ignores the fact that other people have safely pat the tiger on the nose. He concludes that sabretoothed tigers are dangerous and avoids them like the plague. Fnrg passes on his genes.
All that being said, this is just a thought experement proposing one alternate explaination for “synchronicity”. It does not actually disprove anything.
“You shall not practice superstition.” (Leviticus 19:26)
Actually it’s a bit more than that.
The OP states:
So rather than sliding blithely through life the OP is actively looking for coincidence. Perhaps what he is observing is simply an increase in his ability to detect coincidence rather than a change in the number of improbable occurrences around him ?
I find that the clouds in the sky to have more interesting shapes whenever I take the time to look at them, but this doesn’t imply that my awareness of them is somehow changing the behavior of the clouds.
It happens to everyone. The oddest coincidence I ever experienced was when I was dropping my car off for some body work at a body shop in Houston. I asked the owner of the body shop if he had the number of a cab company handy so I could call a ride. When I dialed the number it wasn’t the cab company, it was the offices of the attourney who handled my divorce. I was too startled to even reply to the receptionist – I just slowly put the phone back on the cradle. When I asked the owner if he know my attourney, he said he’d never heard of him – it was just a random wrong number.
People are really bad at probability. Take the example above. It seems totally impossible, but if you run the numbers it’s not as unlikely as it seems. A seven-digit phone number has 10 million combinations, but there are probably 1000 different numbers that would have freaked me out if I had reached them (friends, relatives of friends, work, restaurants and bars where I hung out, my dry cleaners, and so on). That means the chance of me having a weird synchronous experience on a wrong number is something like 1 in 10,000. If I happen to dial a wrong number just twice a year then my chances of a syncronous wrong number sometime in my life is something like 1 in 100. In a city the size of Houston (2 million people) about 20,000 of them will have a weird wrong number experience like mine sometime in their lives. Multiply this by all the possible ways synchrony can happen and it’s not surprising that everyone experiences a weird coincidence once in a while.
Psychologists actually have done experiments that correlate poor probability skills with a belief in the supernatural. People who are bad at guessing the true probabilities of unlikely events are more likely to believe in things like ghosts and ESP and telepathy.
You might want to check out In Search of the Light : The Adventures of a Parapsychologist by Susan Blackmore. It describes her slow conversion from true believer to skeptic. She spent years searching for experimental proof of the supernatural and, when that proved fruitless, turned her energies to figuring out the psychological reasons behind a belief in the supernatural.
I was trying to recall something I had heard regarding a connection between Chaos Theory and synchronicity, and decided to surf up a couple of sites. Unfortunately, all I got was a bunch of new age/Deepak Chopra-ish sites advertising mind expanding conferences and the like. Anyway, they all seem to say that there are links between chaos theory, Jung and synchronicity. Maybe you’ll have better luck filtering the crap
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